family life was more normal." Somehow,
Coulibaly was indoctrinated, and then he
found it all too easy to find weapons.
"It's very easy to get them," Tabet
agreed. "But there's a lot of people who
are made fragile by society, because there's
not enough work for everyone, because
of social problems and all that. But what
I see is that there's a point in common
among those people---they're Muslims."
She added quickly, "And it's not to point
a finger, because I mean the potential
terrorists. But the problem for me is what
they hear in the mosques, in small
groups." She spoke of radical imams
preaching hate.
Ben Ahmed said that Tabet was sim-
ply repeating what she'd heard in the
media.
"But someone indoctrinates them."
"The people who do that are in a net-
work, but not in a network you would
call Muslim," Ben Ahmed said. "Not in
the mosque." He searched for the name
of Coulibaly's recruiter in jail. "Djamel
Beghal. He isn't an imam."
"You can't say that there aren't peo-
ple who use religion to attract these
youths."
"You say 'people,' sure, but you also
said 'imams.' I'm not saying they don't
exist, but you're generalizing from the
exception."
"I'm saying there are many reasons, and
the point in common is these are young
Muslims. And that means something---
it means that they're using religion."
Ben Ahmed seemed to be afraid that
if he accepted Tabet's view he would end
up vindicating the Islamophobes. He
couldn't cross that line. The two friends
were on the verge of an argument that
might inflict lasting hurts.
"Your opinion is interesting," Ben
Ahmed said. "The thing is, I'm convinced
that this doesn't really happen in the
mosques. It's in prison."
"Yes, that's certain," Tabet said.
"And there are people who come to the
mosques to talk with some of them and
succeed in capturing them, on the side."
"Voilà."
They had found just enough com-
mon ground to move on.
More than fifteen hundred French
citizens have left to join the Is-
lamic State---a quarter of the European
total. Around two hundred of them have
returned to France. A growing number
of these new recruits have no connec-
tion to the banlieues. According to Far-
had Khosrokhavar, the majority of French
Muslims going to Syria are now middle-
class youths, some of them white con-
verts to Islam, and an increasing percent-
age of them female.They come from big
cities and small towns. "They do not be-
long to broken families," Khosrokhavar
said. Their radicalization can happen in
a very short time, a matter of weeks, usu-
ally through social media. They go to
the Middle East because they're moved
by the plight of fellow-Muslims. Once
there, some are shocked by the Islamic
State's violence and try to return home;
others are seduced by it.
A few days before the January attacks,
Hayat Boumeddiene, Coulibaly's wife,
flew from Madrid to Turkey, then crossed
into Syria. A security camera at the Istan-
bul airport captured her entry into Tur-
key, alongside a young man with a thin
beard, his long black hair tied back in a
bun. He was a twenty-three-year-old from
the 93 named Mehdi Belhoucine. His
older brother, Mohamed, had become
radicalized through the Internet around
2009, and afterward relayed messages for
a network of French jihadists headed for
central Asia. Mohamed and Mehdi were
now believed to be in Syria. The broth-
ers had been excellent students---Mo-
hamed had done advanced studies in mine
engineering, Mehdi in electronic mechan-
ics---and were from a middle-class fam-
ily who lived in a private house. Ben
Ahmed knew their mother, who worked
with him at Bondy's city hall. "Very nice
lady," he said. "It's too, too sad."
Sylvine Thomassin, the mayor of
Bondy, told me, "I had a clear view of ji-
hadism before January---families with
educational deficiencies, parents who
hadn't done well, kids failing at school."
It was, she said, a weirdly "reassuring di-
agram," because it made the pathway of
radicalism seem predictable. Then came
the stunning news of the Belhoucine
brothers' connection to the authors of the
Paris attacks. The mayor, who knew the
Belhoucines well, now found it impossi-
ble to come up with a profile. "Our Mus-
lim fellow-citizens live overwhelmingly
in public housing, and the majority are
confronted with the same problems as
those who are radicalized, and yet they
aren't radicalized," she said. "So the prob-
lem definitely isn't the banlieues. Perhaps
it's the hypersensitivity of a very small
number to this discourse around them."
Xavier Nogueras, a defense lawyer in
Paris, represents twenty French citizens
accused of jihadism. A few of his clients
are violent and dangerous, he said, but
many went to Syria out of idealism, want-
ing to defend other Muslims against the
"Let me try mine. It's made in China."